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This week Simon Taylor & Cuy Sheffield are joined by:

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Rain has acquired Ansa, adding branded stored-value and closed-loop payments to a platform already built around stablecoin wallets and card issuing.

The starting point matters. Ansa is not a tokenized loyalty product today. Simon Taylor described it as infrastructure that lets merchants create branded stored-value wallets, with a Mastercard arrangement that allows those balances to work through existing terminals. Ryan Bozarth framed the shift as “collapsing ... the stored value stack.” Once card issuance stops differentiating, loyalty, acceptance and programmable money become layers on top of the core capability. His other requirement is interoperability - rewards become more useful when value can move between merchants rather than remain trapped inside one program.

Cuy Sheffield was careful about the maturity of tokenized loyalty. It has not scaled. Most points still live on siloed databases and are difficult to move between merchants. His longer-term idea is that onchain points could become liquid, interoperable and convertible with stablecoins, turning loyalty from a closed balance into something customers can use more widely.

Luca Prosperi supplied the historical parallel. He was in London when Revolut launched its FX card for expats and nomads. Within roughly two years, he said, cheaper FX had become table stakes down to HSBC. By then the important product was the broader platform being built around that customer base, not the FX card itself.

That is how he sees stablecoin cards evolving. Luca disclosed that he sits on KAST’s board and described KAST as one of Rain’s largest clients. His open question for Rain is whether large clients remain on its stack as they scale, or eventually verticalize and connect directly to the card networks.

Cuy pushed the same idea into co-brands:

Today, major co-brand programs are still largely built market by market. Stablecoin infrastructure could make a more global model viable, with loyalty and onchain credit attached to the same relationship. Cuy said he sees those as two likely directions for the next wave of stablecoin-linked cards.

The card increasingly looks like the wedge. The more interesting question is who owns the financial relationship once the card itself becomes common.

Simon discussed Brazil’s new rules, published on 7 August and effective 1 January 2027, which will require VASPs to hold transfers of US$10,000 or more, individually or in daily aggregate, for up to 24 hours where the destination is an offshore virtual asset provider or a self-hosted wallet. The measure creates an additional risk-review window before those transfers leave the regulated perimeter.

That destination condition makes the policy question more interesting. The rule does not put a blanket 24-hour delay on every large stablecoin transfer. It specifically adds friction when money is moving towards an offshore provider or self-custody.

Luca thinks the policy has to be read alongside capital controls. His argument is that once stablecoin flows become large enough to matter to the currency and capital account, governments have a stronger incentive to control the exits.

Ryan compared that instinct with Brazil’s approach to Pix, where regulation has been used to require participation from large financial institutions. In his reading, stablecoins have made that regulatory perimeter more porous, and this is an attempt to rebuild the border.

Cuy focused on the trade-off. Pricing the self-custody exit directly may slow some flows, but it also gives users a reason to ask whether they need the domestic intermediary at all.

Luca put the problem plainly:

He expects some activity to move towards exchanges, brokers and non-custodial rails if the regulated route becomes harder to use. Simon’s broader point was that regulation remains jurisdictional while self-custodial blockchain infrastructure does not.

Brazil is therefore testing something other countries will have to confront: how much control can sit at the gateway once users can hold and move the asset themselves?

Deel has expanded its DLUSD wallet and Earn functionality across 80 markets after first launching with contractors in Argentina.

The usage figures caught the panel’s attention. Simon said figures provided to him showed 74% of payout recipients depositing into Earn, 85% of those deposits remaining after 30 days, and around 60% of eligible users actively earning.

Ryan’s point was commercial. Payroll and marketplace companies already own distribution. Once users leave balances inside the product, the same relationship can support additional revenue lines.

The harder part is what actually generates the return.

Cuy reduced the market to three routes. Door one is issuer economics shared through the distributor with the customer. Door two is the vault model, where the issuer pays nothing and the holder deposits the stablecoin into a lending product. Door three is conversion into a tokenized money-market fund or government security, which brings a more familiar underlying asset but also KYC/KYB and conversion constraints.

Tempo has already productized that choice. Tempo Earn launched on 12 August, letting platforms choose underlying assets and decide how earnings are split with customers across tokenized money-market funds, onchain lending and institutional credit. Deel is the first named deployment.

Simon also described what sits under Deel’s current product on air: DLUSD routes into a Morpho vault on Tempo, borrowers post cbBTC as collateral, and Sentora curates the vault.

That is the structure Luca was reacting to. Luca prefaced his criticism by noting he knows and does business with several of the teams involved, and has known the Morpho team since the beginning. His first claim was sharper than a generic warning about vault risk. He said Coinbase Bitcoin-backed vaults “yield less than risk free.”

His argument is that a depositor can be taking smart-contract, collateral, liquidation and curator risk for less than government debt pays. In that case, he does not think the additional risk is being compensated at all.

His second concern is what happens when vaults broaden from liquid crypto collateral into real-world credit. Luca described the danger as providing a liquid repo against illiquid credit: when margins are thin and the cycle turns, depositors can ask for their money faster than the underlying assets can be sold.

Then comes the curator. Luca drew a line between a curator applying predefined protocol parameters and one assessing real-world borrowers, choosing exposures and rebalancing a portfolio. His view is that the latter is performing the function of a fund manager and should be regulated as one.

He also made a more contentious argument about why Door Two is growing now. Luca said the current push into vaults is driven mainly by regulatory arbitrage: some platforms cannot share float directly with users, while some vaults are heavily incentivized and the platform continues earning on the float on the other side. That is his explanation for why the industry is reaching for lending structures before the end-state products are ready.

But Luca was not arguing against DeFi or vaults as a category. He opened by calling himself a “DeFi fanatic” and said he criticizes the sector because he wants it to improve. His constructive end state includes permissioned vaults, regulated vaults and natively issued investment products. He also said today’s vaults are better than those three years ago and expects vaults in three years to be better again.

His caution was narrower: be careful when an unsophisticated consumer is connected to products they may not understand behind a brand they trust.

Simon added an important counterweight. He said he had spoken with several companies in the previous week that liked the product but were asking exactly what the curator does and where the collateral comes from. His conclusion was that diligence is happening, even if the market still has work to do explaining these products.

That is why Deel’s attach rates matter. Demand for Earn may be arriving faster than the market’s shared understanding of what sits underneath it.

Nasdaq has agreed to acquire LeveL Markets, the third-largest US ATS by trading volume, whose execution platform reaches more than 2,500 buy-side and sell-side clients. The deal sits alongside Nasdaq’s new Digital Liquidity Networks group, which brings its digital-asset and market-modernization work together.

Luca saw the development through a wider capital-markets question. If blockchains increasingly provide the settlement layer, exchanges and market infrastructure providers have to ask what customers will still pay them for.

His answer was liquidity provision, compliance, market matching and the creation of new financial products.

He pointed to ICE’s move into prediction markets and the growth of Canton as other signs that incumbent institutions are preparing for global, 24/7 settlement. His view is that the settlement layer needs to become more open even if different use cases demand different levels of decentralization.

Cuy then moved the discussion inside the bank. Payments teams and asset-management teams have historically run on different infrastructure and often had little reason to interact. He said Visa is now getting questions from asset-management teams at banks about custody infrastructure and stablecoins for settlement.

Corporate treasury is where the convergence becomes practical. Cuy expects businesses to keep more working capital in government securities or money-market funds earning the risk-free rate, then move into stablecoins when a payment needs to leave. If that conversion becomes fast enough, companies need less idle cash sitting in bank accounts purely for liquidity. He expects working-capital requirements for many businesses to fall over the next five years.

Ryan made the same point as a broader market observation rather than a pull quote. He said payments and custody have already gone through a replatforming of money, and capital markets now appear to be moving through a similar change. In his view, the two stacks can reinforce one another as new regulated assets settle into stablecoins and corporate treasuries become more global and active.

Simon closed on the demand forcing institutions to respond:

Nasdaq’s acquisition is one piece of that change. The bigger story is what happens when payments, collateral and invested treasury assets start operating on the same clock.

Disclosure: Simon works at Tempo. Luca is Co-Founder & CEO of M0 and said on the episode that he is an indirect investor in Morpho through a fund he advises. He also disclosed that he sits on KAST’s board.

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